Friday, December 30, 2005

"Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, is breaking away from its longstanding love affair with pure computing power to remake itself as a consumer-friendly brand that will seek to dominate the digital home.

Intel's strategy, based on a new generation of multimedia platforms and chips, will be unveiled next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. For consumers, the technology shift will mean laptop computers with longer battery life and computers that will become digital entertainment hubs in the living room.

When Paul S. Otellini, Intel's chief executive, takes the stage at the show Thursday, he is expected to present a new Intel focused on selling a digital lifestyle rather than hardware."

Monday, December 26, 2005

COMPUTER ARTS / UKWhile you won’t find it printed on any calendar, 2005 marks a quiet anniversary for the program that you, and many other graphic designers, probably use the most. It was 15 years ago in February that Adobe shipped version 1.0 of Photoshop – still its most popular (and lucrative) application, and possibly the only bit of software to have spawned its own verb form.

But the true origins of Photoshop go back even further. The program whose splash screen now displays 41 names was originally the product of just two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, as fascinated by technology as they were by art. It was a trait they’d inherited from their father, a photography buff with his own personal darkroom in the basement and a penchant for early home computer. COMPUTER ARTS / UK

With war photographs confronting us daily, do we need an exhibition to remind us of the body's vulnerability? But the havoc caused by war is only one aspect of it. There is disease, domestic violence, environmental pollution, the enfeeblement of old age, starvation, drug addiction and more - much more. It's a gloomy picture and "The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness and Healing" at the International Center of Photography is not for the squeamish. But the show is not all downbeat.

"The Body at Risk" is a collaboration between the photography center and the Milbank Memorial Fund, a New York-based foundation that since 1905 has sought to improve public health through research and advocacy. The show was assembled by Carol Squiers, a curator at the center, from the work of 16 documentary photographers, among them Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Donna Ferrato, Sebastião Salgado and Marion Post Wolcott. Ms. Squiers has also written a substantial catalog.READ ON...

Sunday, December 25, 2005

By Maureen O'Hagan @ Seattle TimesWhen does inspiration cross the line into imitation?That's the question at the heart of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle claiming two glass blowers have copied Dale Chihuly's designs and are selling knockoffs at several local galleries.The copyright-infringement suit, filed Oct. 27 by Seattle-based Chihuly Inc. and the world-renowned glass artist's publishing company, is asking for at least $1 million in damages.READ ON...

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Until recently, the Wrong Gallery was just an expensive-looking doorway in New York. Today it opens in its new home: Tate Modern.

By Christopher Turner @ The Guardian

If you ever visited the Wrong Gallery in New York, you might have been greeted by a blunt notice: "Fuck Off We're Closed". As it happens, the gallery, which launched in 2002 as the smallest exhibition space in New York, never actually opened. It was nothing more than an expensive-looking glass door, identical to those of the Chelsea white cubes it satirised. Viewers would peer through it into a meagre two and a half square feet of floor space, where in the course of its three-year existence the Wrong Gallery exhibited the work of 40 internationally acclaimed artists. Few passers-by would have guessed that the "Closed" sign - a piece by British artist Adam McEwen - was itself the work on view.

2005 was the best of art times, and it was the worst of art times.By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

The UCLA Hammer Museum offered an invigorating survey of new art that crystallized an emerging sensibility among younger artists, braced against the feeling of dissolution so prevalent now

MoMA launched its special exhibition program with an innocuous show drawn from a big-money corporate collection, then concluded the year with a flimsy retrospective of local artist Elizabeth Murray, whose formidable promise in the 1980s never panned out.

In Berlin, the monumental sterility of New York architect Peter Eisenman's immense Holocaust memorial offered a grim warning about the fate that seems destined to befall the similarly conflicted site for New York's planned 9/11 memorial.

Two very different works lifted the Venice Biennale out of its typical torpor. Barbara Kruger covered the Fascist-era façade of the 1932 Italian pavilion with a "tattoo." READ ON ...

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

By David Pagel @ The Los Angeles TimesSigmund FREUD believed that great art awakens oceanic sentiments, making viewers feel connected to things larger than ourselves. Richard Misrach's most recent photographs take this aspect of Freudian thinking literally. They focus on the ocean to explore the relationship between the individual and infinity.

That sounds spiritual, if not religious, especially for the Berkeley-based photographer known for his unflinching look at chemically contaminated landscapes and nature's sublime unconcern for shortsighted interlopers. But like Freud, Misrach refuses to let his secular work be bullied into submission by traditionalists. At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, his stunning photographs of anonymous folks floating in sun-dappled seas or whiling away lazy afternoons on sandy beaches evoke the pleasures and terrors of the existential struggle to know one's place in the cosmos — and how best to live there.READ ON...

By BRIAN D. JOHNSONThe explosion in digital technology has taken us beyond home entertainment. We've entered a new age of mass communications that would make Marshall McLuhan's head spin. The medium is not just the message, it's the messenger. The new medium is you.

To borrow a bit of branding from Apple, the company that has tried to trademark the lower-case vertical pronoun, you could call it the iRevolution. Its icons are the iPod and the cellphone. They're not home computers but body computers, fashion accessories that now want to be cameras, TVs and radios. The iPod has become a sex symbol of self-expression, a hi-tech fetish that's helped us see the media as something to be individually programmed. With a computer and high-speed Internet, anyone can be a mini media mogul -- producer, director, editor, recording artist, deejay, veejay, journalist, porn star. In the jungle gym of digital data, we're all double-jointed.READ THE ARTICLE

Monday, December 19, 2005

Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). Comprised of seventy digital prints made from color transparencies taken between 1939 and 1943, this exhibition reveals a surprisingly vibrant world that has typically been viewed only through black-and-white images. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II.ONLINE EXHIBIT

Ever wondered what the most powerful man in the world listens to in his spare time? In a rare departure from formal media interviews, George Bush has revealed what is on his personal IPod. Andrew Wilson reports on the President's favourite tunes. SEE FOR YOURSELF

Friday, December 16, 2005

By HOLLAND COTTER @ THE NEW YORK TIMESCombine a gripe against glitzy Pop objects, no money, a yen for the new and maybe a little marijuana, and you have a possible recipe for how and why video became art in the 1970's.

Even with chemicals factored in, though, today's art audience must wonder at the patience that some of those early videos demanded of viewers, with their minimal content spun out for many grainy minutes and hours. It was as if art were saying: this is not Hollywood or television. This is not entertainment (though sometimes it was). This is serious. This is work.

No one would buy that line now. Digital has happened. Matthew Barney has happened. An art industry has happened, spitting out cash-and-carry product while you wait. And some of the very shortest, newest pieces in "Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video" at the Bronx Museum of the Arts seem custom-made for this art-bite moment. READ ON ...

BY KEN JOHNSON @ THE NEW YORK TIMESFor a long time, supporters of fine-art photography tried to raise it above its more vulgar photographic kin. Since the 1960's, however, a counterdevelopment has seen collectors and curators avidly seeking popular or vernacular forms of photography: commercial studio portraits, snapshots, postcards, film stills and other sorts of kitsch sold by the bagful at flea markets and on eBay. READ ON ...

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Ripplecast Pro apps training on Aperture, Automator, Compressor, Final Cut Pro, and more. Photographers may want to snap up the four Ripplecasts already available for Aperture.

Digital Production BuzzEach week Creative Planet's Digital Production BuZZ will be working to keep you in touch with trends and technologies, people and practices that you need to know to keep up to date with digital production, postproduction and evolving distribution opportunities.

Creative CowCreative Communities of the World. Everything involving creativity in our digital world

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

OY! This is a monster!"With the release of the P45, Phase One once again rises above its competition and stands alone in fulfilling the aspirations of professional photographers achieving incredible speed and efficiency through the P45’s capture rate of 35 frames-per-minute and write speed of up to 20MB/s". Santa? Are you listening? PHASE ONE

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

By Erik MarcusI started my show October of 2004, and have slowly built my audience over the past year of podcasting. My first shows got barely a hundred listeners. But by last month, my audience was approaching 1500 people. Those may not be huge numbers, but I was proud of the relatively rapid growth in my audience. It came from a lot of hard work.

Then, out of the blue a few weeks ago, my audience collapsed overnight — it dropped by some 75 percent. My podcast had been “podjacked.”

If you’re involved in podcasting, you need to know about podjacking. This article will tell you what podjacking is, how to avoid becoming a victim, and how to take action if it happens to you.READ ON....

Luhring Augustine and RS&A Ltd, a London-based company dedicated to producing innovative projects with contemporary artists, are pleased to present an exhibition featuring ten chess sets designed by some of the world's leading contemporary artists in a celebration of the game and its continued relevance to the creative arts.

On view will be ten recently commissioned chess sets designed by the following: Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama, Maurizio Cattelan, Rachel Whiteread, Tunga, Matthew Ronay, Barbara Kruger and Tom Friedman. Each set, made in an edition of seven, is individually crafted in a variety of different materials such as wood, porcelain, glass and silver and packaged to the artist's specified wishes. VISIT SITE

What is behind the new Zeiss Ikon system? Did you wonder why Carl Zeiss has started up in the camera business and launches a rangefinder camera? How did the design of the camera develop and what had our Zeiss engineers in mind regarding the technical specification of the Zeiss Ikon camera and the ZM-mount lenses? Take a look behind the scenes! Get to know more about the background of the new Zeiss Ikon camera system!ZEISS IKON SITE

People Contribute Record Number of Photos & Video to BBC After London Fire

People e-mailed the BBC with more than 6,500 photos or mobile phone video clips of the inferno at the Buncefield oil depot explosion yesterday.

According to MediaGuardian, this set a new record for emails sent to the BBC in the aftermath of an event. After the July 7th London Underground bombings, the BBC's yourpics@bbc.co.uk site received around 1,000 images and mobile clips from the public.

MediaGuardian quoted Pete Clifton, the head of BBC News Interactive:

"The range of material we received from our readers was absolutely extraordinary. Video, still pictures and emails poured in from the moment the blast happened, and it played a central part in the way we reported the unfolding events." Half a million unique users viewed clips and footage yesterday on the BBC's online news video service, an audience second only to number of requests for clips on 7 July.

By Wayne J. CosshallInfra-red film has been (and still is) quite widely used both in scientific photography and in more creative forms of photography, where both areas make use of the very different tonalities (and colours) produced. What is not widely known is that most, if not all, digital cameras are also sensitive to IR and can be used to produce monochrome IR shots.READ ON....

SUNNYVALE, California -- In its latest acquisition of a social networking service, internet powerhouse Yahoo on Friday chomped down on del.icio.us, a startup that enables people to more easily compile and share their favorite content on the web.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company didn't disclose how much it paid for New York-based del.icio.us because the purchase price wasn't large enough to have a significant impact on its finances.READ MORE

ePOST is a cooperative, serverless email system. Each user contributes a small amount of storage and network bandwidth in exchange for access to email service. ePOST provides • A serverless, peer-to-peer email service • Secure email emong ePOST users • An organically scaling service that requires no dedicated hardware • Very high availability and data durability • Compatibility with POP/IMAP clients, SMTP mail serversWe have deployed ePOST to show that a cooperative peer-to-peer system can provide availability, reliability and security that matches or exceeds that of server-based solutions, while reducing hardware cost and administrative overhead.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you're doing and where you are going--similar to cookies. Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit.

Take a look at their updated privacy statement. About half-way down the page, in the section on cookies, you will see a link that says "web beacons".

Click on the phrase "web beacons". That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network."

In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link that will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.

Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next screen. Be careful, because on that page there is a "Cancel Opt-out" button that, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out.

NEW YORK, Dec. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Only a year ago, podcasting was an arcane activity, the domain of a few techies and self-admitted "geeks." Now you can hear everything from NASCAR coverage to NPR's All Things Considered in downloadable audio files called "podcasts". Thousands of podcasts are available at the iTunes Music Store, and websites such as iPodder.com and Podcast.net track thousands more. That's why the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected "podcast" as the Word of the Year for 2005. Podcast, defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player," will be added to the next online update of the New Oxford AmericanDictionary, due in early 2006.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

After three years of inactivity, I thought I might revisit and start fresh with my blog. To start let me show you what I am currently working on. I am working on a brief description (I hate doing that) for a small publication and will post it when I am comfortable with it.